One kind of distributed data processing application involves having multiple computers process a large number of data files accessed from a single source. An example of such an application arises in analyzing data from server logs. A server computer generates one or more logs of activity occurring on the server computer. Such logs are data files stored on the server computer. In a data center with many such server computers, the logs from multiple server computers are periodically copied from the server computers to another storage system, from which the logs can be accessed for analysis. Typically, given the volume of data in such server logs, multiple computers are used to analyze the data. Each computer accesses and processes a subset of the data files from the storage system.